


Bends in the Road

by dieofthatroar



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Amnesia, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, I told myself no tropes and then this happened, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, the first thought your soulmate has about you is tattooed on your skin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-16
Updated: 2017-01-16
Packaged: 2018-09-17 22:56:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9349907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dieofthatroar/pseuds/dieofthatroar
Summary: Major life events can change your mark, that’s what they say. “Bends in the road of life,” Bitty’s Mama tells him. “It means you have control over your own future,” is Jack’s father’s take.Jack doesn’t think about his mark until it changes when Bitty goes down hard on the ice. Bitty can’t remember who any of them are and Jack’s mark now reads, "Who is he?"





	

When Jack shrugs off his shirt and reaches for Kent, he knows what Kent is searching for: a sentence, a word, a mark of black ink somewhere on his body. He’s seen Kent’s before, _good form_ in tight script on his shoulder blade. But Jack doesn’t have a soulmark. He’s come to terms with it, set his sights on goals that have nothing to do with partners, and taken whatever he wanted at the time. Right now, it’s Kent’s lips. He won’t allow himself to feel shame when Kent sighs and says, “I thought…” Jack only pulls him closer and tells him it doesn’t matter. That right now, neither of them needs a soulmate if they have each other. On the ice the next day, it will be a different story.

 

Eric’s skin is clean. He listens to stories his cousins and classmates tell about words that appeared when they were really little. Silly kid thoughts like, _I wonder if he’ll be my friend?_ Because in towns like this, people find their soulmates in elementary school and marry in high school and live happily ever after. Eric is sad at first, asking his Mama if he’s different, but Mama says that sometimes it takes time. That the world works in funny ways, and the path isn’t always so clear. Just wait.

When Eric gets a little older, he knows that he’s different. He sits in a locked closet and knows exactly why he doesn’t have a mark.

 

***

 

Jack wakes up in a hospital. It’s sometime in the next day or two that he finds the mark. It’s bubbly text, seemingly feminine, on the inner space of his thigh. It reads, _Well, he sure looks like a hockey player._

It’s a relief, but not in the way his mother thinks when she catches him with the sheets of his bed tangled around his ankle, staring at the new words. She says, “Oh, Jack,” and puts a hand over her heart, imagining happiness in love. Perhaps a cure to whatever sickness put him here in the first place. Jack, though, thinks about how he still has hockey. He will be a hockey player in that unknown point in his future where he meets this person and that knowledge, more than the realization that he finally has a soulmate, puts him at ease as he recovers.

 

Eric’s mark comes in on a day like any other. He made no big decisions recently, the course of his life didn’t seem to change at all. One day, while he and his mother are baking, he notices it. One word, block letters, on his forearm: _Small._

He squeals and drops the measuring cups to the floor. “Mama,” he says, not able to make real words come out of his mouth. He’s shaking and there might be tears in his eyes but he could also blame the spilled flour caught in the air. She turns from the sink and Bitty points to his arm. “Mama.”

It’s then that Eric knows he’ll never grow into being the football star that his father wants him to be, but it’s alright because there’s someone who won’t care. Even when his mother says (in the sweetest of voices, but that doesn’t change anything, does it?) “Dicky, I know you’ll make her happy,” he’s content because there’s going to be someone out there who will love him how he wants to be loved.

 

***

 

The funny thing is, the words aren’t always so obvious, are they? You don’t shout out what’s in your head the moment you meet a stranger. There’s no universal signal to show off your marks (harder for some to do than others - nobody wants you to drop your pants, Shitty) and no expectation that either party will even remember the event later. So, the moment passes both Jack and Bitty by without fireworks or sirens or kisses. It’s orientation week at Samwell and the coaches introduce Jack to the frogs.

“This will be your captain for the year, boys.”

Bitty shakes his hand. Jack looks down his nose at him, calculating.

 

***

 

Jack doesn’t think about his mark much in college. He has a goal, and he’s aiming towards it. Be a good leader, a good player, and then one day he’ll make it. He’ll put his head down and work hard until then.

Sometimes, in the shower or when he’s changing or early in the morning, Jack will stare at his mark. He imagines himself in the NHL, full gear. People cheering. It focuses him on what he wants.

Not many people know about the mark. Of course, not many people have seen it. Shitty has. He even gets Jack to talk about it, a little, and then tells him to get his head out of his ass. “Bro, relationships are so much more than the first moment,” he says. “It gets all of this hype, but it’s just a marker, right? One timestamp in a thing that’s supposed to last forever. Like, get this, the guy next to me in my sociology seminar last semester? _Fucking asshole_ marked on his hand. The story went something along the lines of bumping into a girl at the cafeteria, but they’re happy now, right? But imagine if you took that to heart.”

“But what if it helps?” Jack asks.

Shitty is quiet as he considers. “I can’t tell you not to think that way if it helps,” he says. “But man, don’t forget to look around once in awhile. You might already be there.”

 

Bitty’s mark is in a pretty visible location, so when he settles into Samwell and gets comfortable with the team, he doesn’t feel like he has to hide it.

He’s making breakfast for the team one morning and Ransom and Holster are hovering and the bacon, “being helpful.” (They’re scavengers by nature, hovering until they see an opening.) As Holster reaches for a piece still slick with hot grease, Bitty whacks him with the back of the spoon he’s using for pancake batter.

“Ow,” Holster says, pulling his arm back.

“That’s what you get,” Bitty says and moves back to the pancakes. He rolls his sleeves up without thinking too much about it. Holster’s still hovering.

“Isn’t that what everybody thinks when they first see you?” Holster says, pointing to Bitty’s arm.

“Hm?” Bitty says and sees Holster checking out his mark. “Well, not everyone's a hockey giant like y’all.”

“Oh, does that mean your soulmate is a hockey giant?” Ransom says.

“A hockey giant like one of us?” Holster says.

“Oh, oh! Quick team poll, who thought _small_ when they first met Bits?”

Bitty flushes, pushing his sleeves back down. “Ransom, no…”

Ransom and Holster both raise their hands high, eagerly watching the others gathered around the kitchen and peripheral hallway. Shitty shrugs, and raises his hand. Johnson says, “sure,” and Jack grunts a little from the doorway.

“Bro, it could be any of us,” Ransom says. And somehow, that makes Bitty a little happy. He doesn’t want to admit why.

 

***

 

Midway through Bitty’s second year at Samwell, he gets checked. He knows this one is worse than the one where he got a concussion as soon as he’s in the air. He hears screaming around him. A distant roar. But somehow he can pick out Jack’s voice out of it all, a harsh sound like it was dragged out of him, tearing through his throat. “Bittle!” Time slows for a moment and he braces for when he falls.

 

They don’t let Jack see him. That’s the first sign that it’s really bad. It’s his fault, again. His risky call that sent Bitty flying. He curses and screams but Bitty’s being taken to the hospital and Jack can’t even see him.

“What is it?” he demands. The coaches make him back away from the locker room doors, not letting him cross.

“He’s confused,” they explain. “He doesn’t know the date, he doesn’t know where he is. We had to get him checked out by a neurologist as soon as we could because if there’s a bleed…” Jack couldn’t hear anything else that he said. The frantic ringing in his ears had gotten too loud.

Jack stays at the rink until everyone else has cleared out from the game, pacing. Thinking. Waiting for a call to let him know if Bitty is okay. He shouldn’t feel this strongly. He needs to get his emotions under control - to a place where he doesn’t feel like the walls are closing in and it takes effort to gasp for each breath. He knows how close he is from a panic attack and the only thing he can do is distract himself until there is better news to focus on.

Shitty finds him, eventually. “Bro, you’ve gotta change. Bitty’s not going to want his _glad you’re alive_ hug from you if you smell like that.”

“Shitty…” Jack says and grips the bench until his knuckles go white.

“I know. I know. Go take a shower, get dressed, and we’ll drive to the hospital. Alright?”

Jack does as he’s instructed. Pulls off his uniform, runs the shower, all by muscle memory, as he’s done a hundred times before. His mind is racing somewhere far away. The locker rooms are empty now and silent as he turns the water off. Did he do the right thing? Was he worthy of playing if he kept making the same mistakes? Who would want to be friends with, or even love, somebody who couldn’t keep his teammates safe.

As he wipes down his body, his eyes drift to his thigh. He wants to remind himself again of what is still his.

But the words are gone.

Jack takes a slow breath, counts, and closes his eyes. Does the exercises he was taught to keep his anxiety at bay. He isn’t going crazy. This was a stressful day. _Ground yourself._ He opens his eyes, but there was still nothing there.

His breath hitches again and he looks over his body. He checks the skin of both legs, both arms, his torso, then runs to the mirror to see the rest of what he can’t twist far enough to spot.

There, he sees it on his collarbone: _Who is he?_

The same bubbly script, backward in the mirror. Jack knows what it means, though he doesn’t know that it was possible. And he knows why it hurts so much.

 

Eric wakes up with the worst headache he’s ever had. The lights are strong and he’s confused. It doesn’t feel like his bed. There are strange noises. People around him talking, beeping of something that isn’t his alarm. Is it a school day? Is he late? And _why_ are the lights on? He blinks his eyes open.

“Oh, Dicky!” his mother says.

“Mama?”

He looks around and Eric finds he’s in a hospital. He remembers the smells and sounds from when he visited his grandfather a couple years ago after he broke his hip.

“What happened?” he asks, mentally tallying each part of his body to see if it is whole. Toes don’t hurt, feet, legs… except for his pounding head, he can’t find anything broken. But the way his mother bites her lip in worry makes his stomach uneasy.

“You don’t remember the check?” she says carefully like she’s trying to tease an answer out of him.

“Check?” Eric repeats, his heart starting to race. He doesn’t remember a hockey game. “But it’s supposed to be non-contact.”

His mother’s face drops. “College hockey, Dicky.”

“College?”

The doctors come in soon, explaining what had happened. They had taken scans while he was unconscious and they were hopeful, but he’s scheduled for a second MRI in a couple hours to ensure there isn’t any bleeding. For now, he’s under observation. The words go fast and Eric has trouble catching the meaning of what he’s being told: that at least two years of his life have disappeared. Like he has simply stepped out of a time-machine into a new age and has to familiarize himself with the world around him. He’s terrified.

So, Eric does what he always does when he’s confused or scared or lonely. He reaches for his forearm and rubs the spot that reads _small_. But when he lifts his arm out of the sheets, the mark isn’t there. His mind is slow to register, still in a fog of pain and disorientation, but he knows where his soulmark is. Out of everything he doesn’t know right now, he knows this, and it isn’t there.

“Mama,” he says, fear rising in his voice. “Mama!”

“Dicky? What’s wrong?”

He grasping at his skin, forcing his nails to scratch and for him to make sure that, yes, this is really his arm. He can feel it, but there is no word. “It’s gone,” he says. “It’s gone. It’s gone.” Eric’s crying, holding his arm to his chest. He doesn’t know what he did to have his soulmate taken away. He can’t remember. He can’t remember.

 

The doctors explain that sometimes with traumatic events, soulmarks can change. Turns in the road, as his family had put it when he was so young. A life is heading one way and then a decision - to turn right, to move, to decide on a college - can change the universe and mix up who meets whom.

But this isn’t another turn in the road. Eric hasn’t lost his soulmate. The doctors say, no. He still has a soulmark, but it’s on his waist now and reads: _Please, let him be alright._

 

Jack visits Bitty as soon as he’s allowed, but he’s warned that he doesn’t remember any of them. He goes with Shitty and Lardo and let them run in first. He hangs back by the door and watches as Lardo hugs Bitty close and Shitty jokes. Bitty looks nervous at first like Jack remembers from his first few weeks at Samwell. Shy, but eager to please.

“Bitty, we’ve been dying without your baking. You’ve gotta save us from the torture of _cafeteria sweets_.”

Jack can see Bitty pause, repeating his name with silent lips: _Bitty_. He then touches the space on his arm where Jack knows his soulmark used to be. Yes, Jack can see that Bitty’s had moved too. His heart does strange things in his chest, sinking and soaring at once.

Then, Bitty makes eye contact with him and Jack feels like he’s about to throw up. His whole face is a question. _Who is he?_ Jack reminds himself. That’s what he’s thinking and it’s so strange to be so sure.

“Jack,” he says, reintroducing himself. He tries not to trip over his own tongue.

“Mr. Captain over here has been worried about you,” Shitty says.

“I’m sorry,” Bitty says.

And Jack knows he can’t say anything. As much as he wants to gather the boy in his arms and say _I’ve found you_ , he can’t. It isn’t fair to Bitty. It was his fault this happened at all, so it’ll be his problem alone until Bitty’s better.

Eric is released after a few days after talks of _possible spontaneous recovery_ and _unsure timeline_ and _frequent checkups to ensure no lasting damage_.

He goes back to Samwell. ( _Back_ , because that’s what everybody around him says. Eric keeps expecting that something will trigger a memory: the campus, the Haus, his room, but nothing does.) His teammates are so nice, helping him get his schedule back together and letting everybody know what happened. He’ll be going to his classes, trying to ease back into a life everyone keeps explaining he has, but the whole time he feels like an actor playing a game called _What would Bitty do?_

 

Jack stays as far away from Bitty as he can, within reason. He still wants to help him and he still wants more than anything for him to be alright, but he’s afraid of what he’ll say each time they speak. Which is still quite often, seeing as his is the closest door Bitty will knock on when he’s trying to figure himself out. Meanwhile, Jack has a constant watch on his anxiety. Recently, it’s felt like a jacket a couple sizes too small, always nagging and uncomfortable but not yet a full-blown problem. Jack hasn’t told anybody yet about his mark and what it means. He goes for longer runs to calm himself, trains harder, plans plays in the margins of his notebooks with notes to himself saying, _safety first._ Then, he thinks of Bitty again, blank-faced and confused, and the tightness around his chest gets worse.

He’s still Bitty though, thoroughly, in some ways. Jack finds him in the kitchen with three pies on the counter and another in construction. Jack pads over to the fridge to grab a drink and Bitty startles.

“Oh, Jack! I didn’t see you.” Bitty has a hand over his heart and a little redness around his ears. It feels so normal, almost comfortable. Jack chuckles.

“I see you’ve been busy.”

“Sorry! Sometimes, when I’m in a kitchen and…”

“Pies just appear. We know, we’ve gotten used to it.” Jack inhales the smells of a Bitty-filled kitchen. “How long are you going to make me wait for them?”

“They _just_ came out of the oven, you’ll have to be patient.”

“I will, I will. Did you find everything in here alright?”

Bitty’s hands slow their work. “It’s strange, really. I don’t remember anything about this place, but when I’m baking my body just knows? I open a cabinet before I can think of why and I find flour. The tins, the spices, they’re all exactly where I guess. It seems… I don’t know, a little creepy to me right now.”

“We’re here for you, Bittle,” Jack says. “I’m here.”

Bitty nods and Jack purses his lips, grabbing his drink and heading up the stairs before he can say anything more. Something he might regret later.

 

Eric likes Lardo. She puts him at ease in a way some of the boys don’t, with their loud banter and large bodies (bless their hearts, they do mean well). He finds it easy to just sit at the kitchen table with her and talk about anything. Eric finds himself leaning on her, setting his head on her shoulder like they do this all the time. Similar to the baking supplies, his body already knows what to do. It feels safe.

Eric touches the empty space on his forearm - also a habit, but one he remembers. “Did I… did I know who?”

Lardo shakes her head. “We had fun trying to guess,” she says.

“They say I’ve already met them, whoever it is,” Eric says. He bites his lip. “Was I dating anybody?”

“You had a few dates to dances and coffee, but nothing that stuck for too long.”

Eric sighs. “It’s not like they’d like me like this anyway.”

Lardo punches him in the shoulder. “Don’t you dare.”

Eric shakes his head clear. “Sorry, it’s all just overwhelming.”

“Come here,” Lardo says and opens her arms.

 

Jack watches Bitty and Lardo from the hallway. Their backs are turned so they don’t see him as his chest tightens and the blood rushes to his head. He escapes as fast as he can and makes it to the bathroom before he starts feeling likes he’s going to faint. He sits on the tile floor and counts backward from one-hundred.

“Jack?” It’s Shitty, talking to him from the other side of the door. “Jack I know what your breathing sounds like.”

The roar in Jack’s ears is almost enough to block out the sound of Shitty’s voice.

“Bro, open the door.”

He does, slowly. Shitty closes it behind him.

“Breathe with me, Jack,” he says. “Come on, don’t think, just breathe.”

He does that as well, staring at Shitty’s mustache. The tiles are cool and the room stops spinning. They’re quiet for a while, on the floor of the bathroom.

“Sorry,” Jack says.

“I already told you, man, no apologizing for this shit. Just talk to me.”

“What do you want me to say?”

Shitty’s mustache twitches. “It’s Bitty, I know. But I don’t get exactly what you’re fixating on this time.” He waits for Jack to answer, but when it’s clear he won’t, Shitty keeps talking. “You know it’s not your fault, right? Not every hit is your fault, you can’t see the future. And in no way was it intentional. You can’t blame yourself.”

“It was careless.”

“No, it was bad luck.”

Jack buries his head in his hands. “I couldn’t see it,” he says. “How could I not see it? It’s so obvious.”

“Okay, now I think we’re talking about something different.”

“He doesn’t deserve… I can’t…”

“Jack.”

Jack starts stripping off his shirt, pulling the bottom over his shoulders.

“Woah,” Shitty says. “This is usually my thing, but...”

Jack points to his collarbone. He doesn’t have to look at it anymore to know where to put his hands, he’s stared into the mirror for long enough since that game to memorize the mark’s spot. Shitty’s eyes go wide.

“Is that?”

Jack nods and pulls an angry hand through his hair, tearing at it as if he needs something to hold on to. “Bitty,” he says and his voice is raw, shattered.

“Oh, shit.”

 

Jack, against Shitty’s advice, keeps his distance from Bitty as much as he can in the following weeks. “It’s not just your call,” Shitty says, but Jack knows it’s for the best. Bitty needs space to figure everything out himself. If only it didn’t make him feel so lonely.

 

It gets easier for Eric in the next few weeks. He gets into a routine, knows where his classes are, and feels like he really has friends. He has to trust his instincts (like the ones that tell him what times the shower runs hot and how not to sit on that dreadful couch) but he thinks he’s doing a good job. The hockey crew even forgets, sometimes, that he isn’t the same Bitty they knew before. They tease him or beg him for sweets, and Eric chirps them right back. But then, Chowder says something like, “this is like that time you took away my pie privileges for a week!” and Eric can just nod and look away. It sounds like something he would do, sure, but the conversation still sags and fizzles out there because he has nothing to say to that.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” Chowder backtracks when he realizes what he’s said.

“No, no…” Eric says.

“It’s a good story,” Ransom offers, makes eye contact with Holster, and then suddenly there’s a full-on reenactment in the living room.

So, it’s not so bad.

 

Jack realizes, as he’s making plans for the next year, that he’s talking to GMs from teams closer and closer to Samwell. Favoring the teams he can imagine himself playing at and still being able to drive to the school. He tries to tell himself that it’s because the teams are better, that the decision has nothing to do with Bitty or his soulmark or any of that. (He decided once before in his life that these marks didn’t have any business interrupting his career, what he wanted to do with his life. But it was easier then, wasn’t it?)

However, in between phone calls and filling out pro-con lists on his desk, he realizes that the future is much longer than the past. That he can build a lot more than what has already been torn down. He’s done _that_ once before as well.

Jack allows himself to favor the Falconers.

 

Eric still misses skating. To this version of him, it’s just as important as the Bitty version of him. Still as close in his memories and his muscles miss it too. He’s not cleared for hockey yet, but he goes to practices and watches as much as his heart can take. And then, eventually, he sneaks out to Faber in the early mornings and skates by himself.

The light through the windows is beautiful in the mornings. Eric skates through the squares of sunlight and thinks of nothing. There’s nobody here to please. He loves them, of course, he loves them all, but it gets so tiring to hope that he’s saying the right thing at all times, watching his friends’ faces for their reactions. He missed this so much.

Eric’s out there for half an hour, so lost inside himself that he doesn’t hear another skater join him.

“Should you be doing this?” Jack says.

And this still seems normal. Eric stops and looks across the rink, expecting more surprise than he feels. But it seems so normal, just the two of them on the ice with the light like this. He doesn’t feel like he needs to force himself to mold into Bitty again.

“I don’t care.”

“Yeah, I know the feeling.”

Jack lets him skate. Now, there is just the sound of two blades against ice instead of one. Eric thinks Bitty was a very physical person, all of his hugs and shoulder rubs and cuddles have been reciprocated with enthusiasm at the Haus. It surprises him just a little, since in high school he tended to keep most of those urges to himself. He’s almost jealous of Bitty and how easy it seemed for the college version of him to express himself how he had always wanted to. So stupid, isn’t it? To be jealous of yourself. But it was a little different with Jack. His instincts were the same _touch, cuddle, attention_ , but he always stopped himself, like something told him he wasn’t supposed to.

Jack hadn’t reached out to him, anyway, like the others had. Maybe it just wasn’t his thing… or maybe that line was there for another reason.

Eric stops by the boards and watches Jack. Thinking that maybe this is his version of a Lardo cuddle or a Chowder puppy-dog eyes.

“I feel like we’ve done something like this before,” Eric says and Jack stops.

“We have.”

“Just the two of us?”

Jack looks pained for a moment. “Checking practice,” he says. “You were so afraid of being checked it was affecting your game and we worked through it.”

“Makes sense,” Eric says. “When I was in peewee football, Coach thought it would build character for me to practice with the groups he was coaching, rather than my own age. I was small then too and they were two or three years older than me. For a while I was fine, nobody wanted to tackle the coach’s son, but he caught on. Coach sat down the team and made them promise not to treat me any different. The first solid hit I took dislocated my shoulder.” Eric shrugs. “It wasn’t that bad, really, but I’ve had a block ever since. I’m… I’m glad I could work through it.”

“You’ve never told me that,” Jack says.

“Really?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know… If I hadn’t pushed you so hard, maybe…”

“Wow. Are you apologizing for helping me?”

“Sorry,” Jack says again and looks away. Eric wants to reach out, hold his arm and tell him not to worry. Put his arms around his waist and hug him better. But again, there’s a wall there in his mind that tells him, no.

“Were we close, Jack?” Eric asks.

“You live across the hall. We share a shower, your singing is annoying but I’ve gotten used to it. We took a class together last term and you made sure I passed.”

“Those are facts. I’ve been getting _facts_ all the time and it’s so hard to tell what they all mean.”

“Bittle,” Jack says a little strained, and Eric does finally reach out. He touches Jack’s cheek, gently. Leaning slightly into it, Jack says, “When I first saw you, I thought you were so small.”

“Small?” Eric says and something on the edge of his mind is pulling. He might just be putting fictions together, but he tugs on the string of something like a memory. “I think… I think when I first saw you, I thought you looked exactly how a captain was supposed to. Like a real hockey player.”

Jack’s eyes snap to Eric’s face. “Bittle!?”

And then something goes _tick tick_ in Eric’s mind and like reaching for something in the kitchen, it just feels natural. Jack’s voice saying his name right before he landed on the ice. Jack making plays. Jack with flour in his hair. Jack sitting next to him on the bus on roadies. Jack with a camera in his hand. Jack smiling. Jack.

Now it’s like an avalanche and Bitty collapses on the ice, taking Jack with him. He’s laughing and then it’s too much and he feels dizzy. Weightless. He remembers. He remembers all of it.

“Bittle! Are you alright?”

Bitty lies on his back on the ice, letting the coolness spread around him. “Yes!” he says. “Don’t worry, Mr. Captain. I’m alright.”

 

They have a party when Bitty tells the team he’s recovered (of course they do) and the whole time Jack hovers by Bitty’s side, relishing the feel of his hand in his hand. The comfort in knowing that this is real.

“So,” Shitty says pulling the collar of Jack’s shirt until the mark is visible. “Man of mystery, Jack Zimmermann. Forever marked with such an existential question. _Who is he?_ Will we ever know?”

“Someone who worries too much,” Bitty says and pulls Jack back into the crowd so they can dance.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm dieofthatroar on tumblr. Feed me all your terrible AUs.


End file.
